Suchergebnisse

Many governments highly encourage electric mobility today, aiming at a high market penetration. This development would bring forth an impact on the energy system, which strongly depends on the driving and charging behavior of the users. While an uncontrolled immediate charging might strain the local grid and/or higher peak loads, there are benefits to be gained by a controlled charging. We examine six European mobility studies in order to display the effects of controlled and uncontrolled unidirectional charging. Taking into account country specific driving patterns, we generate for each country a charging load curve corresponding to uncontrolled charging and consider the corresponding parking time at charging facilities in order to identify load shift potentials. The main results are that besides the charging power of the vehicles, the possibility to charge at the work place has a significant influence on the uncontrolled charging curve. Neither national nor regional differences are as significant. When charging is only possible at home, the vehicle availability at charging facilities during the day for all countries is at least 24%. With the additional possibility to charge at work, at least 45% are constantly available. Accordingly, we identified a big potential for load shifting through controlled ...

Negative attitudes toward immigrants are widespread in Western societies, and research has repeatedly attempted to explain such attitudes with the presence of cultural diversity arising from a high number of immigrants. Highlighting how political psychology integrates individual and contextual levels of explanation, the present paper aims to overview research that reaches beyond this narrow focus of diversity (i.e., immigrant proportion) to understand anti-immigrant attitudes in culturally diverse societies. First, we present research that reconciles two opposing intergroup mechanisms – contact and threat – both triggered by a high proportion of immigrants. Second, emphasis is placed on ideological climates, a novel contextual antecedent of anti-immigrant attitudes understood as collectively shared norms and values permeating all spheres of social life. Ideological climates influence anti-immigrant attitudes beyond individual characteristics and further shape individuals' responses to cultural diversity. Third, the paper extends existing research on a Person × Context interaction approach to anti-immigrant attitudes and suggests how cultural diversity and ideological climates differentially impact the link between individual-level ideologies and anti-immigrant attitudes. The growing field of multilevel research on anti-immigrant attitudes is overviewed and empirical illustrations of our recent research in Switzerland are provided. We conclude by discussing the benefits and further challenges of integrating individual and contextual antecedents in political psychology and beyond.

While it is painfully clear that the 'ever closer' monetary and financial union in the EU has run into serious trouble there has been very little study of the degree to which the countries have become similar or different in their economic growth dynamics. This paper therefore goes beyond the traditional convergence literature to look at their dynamic convergence and explore the path of their changing similarity in the frequency domain. The results show that while a core group of countries may be developing together, there appears to be at least seven identifiable groups of countries with different growth dynamics. Greece appears to be in a class on its own. Business cycles are important but longer-term trends and higher frequency fluctuations all have a role to play in facilitating adjustment. These results provide awkward implications for policy, particularly for those who thought that simply having a union would draw countries closer together (endogenous OCA criteria).

Policymakers in the EU member states are currently shaping rescue packages to prevent the financial crisis hitting their economies with unmitigated force. Each government is responding to the emerging problems with a country-specific set of measures. Given the global nature of the crisis, would coordinated action at the European level not be a better approach? Was the German government much-criticised for its initial reluctance to adopt massive fiscal stimulation measures right after all to exploit the option value of waiting in a situation of high uncertainty?